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E-book subscription model: Emphasize old books and play lists?
January 1, 2010 | 5:29 pm
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By David Rothman
Here, from Akin Ajayi in the Guardian. Jeez, people were talking years ago about e-book subscriptions, and Baen has been actually doing it. Old stuff.
But I like Ajayl’s idea of the use of themes, aka playlists, and of using the subscription model to give new life to backlist books. I just wonder if Jane Friedman at Open Read isn’t on to this stuff already. If not, she needs to be.
(Thanks, Gary.)
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Comments:
Actually, what Baen is doing with Webscriptions is not so much “subscriptions” as selling a single month’s worth of stuff at a time but letting you peek early. Now, Jim Baen’s Universe, that was a subscription.
What Ajayi is suggesting is actually a lot closer to the sort of e-libraries offered by Fictionwise and Overdrive, which I covered for TeleRead a while ago.
Many libraries already use Overdrive to circulate ebooks (and other media) but as with print books, you can only borrow what your library owns. As far as I know there is no system yet for interlibrary loan of ebooks. Smaller publishers that don’t get much notice from libraries might possibly be able to use the subscription model successfully.